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The diverse grassroots group, which numbers around 30 and includes youth outreach workers, academics, activists and members of the Ontario Law Union, will decide at a meeting Monday between a Charter challenge, a class action lawsuit or small claims court.

Some members are advocating all three.

“It’s really about, as a community, deciding which way we want to go,” said Cutty Duncan, a community worker in Weston Mt. Dennis, an area of the city that has been heavily “carded” by police.

“We want to make sure that there are options for people who find themselves in conflict,” he said. “And we want to explore how we can fight back a bit. This meeting really is about launching that legal option.”

Toronto police stop, question and document — or card — hundreds of thousands of people every year. Most have done nothing wrong, yet their personal information, and that of those they’re with, ends up in a massive database that police use to investigate crimes. Police also record an individual’s race as black, brown, white or other.

Several Star investigations have shown police card black and brown people at disproportionately high rates. Police contend they card in violent areas of the city and have every right to be there.

Race has become a divisive issue for activist groups such as Black is Not a Crime and Rights Watch Network, which have appealed to the board to limit carding.

The force maintains carding is legal.

“There have been a number of deputations (at the board) that have said various things from it’s entirely illegal to challenging parts of it,” said police spokesperson Mark Pugash. “That’s not what our view is.”

However, some legal experts disagree.

Former prosecutor Howard Morton, a member of the law union, says there are very narrowly defined situations where police can ask for identification. They include when officers pull over a driver or stop someone they believe is drinking underage.

A third category, called “investigative detention” was set out by a court of appeal about 10 years ago and allows police to briefly detain and question an individual when they “believe a person has a link to the offence, either as a suspect or a witness,” says Morton.

“The big block of what happens in this city and elsewhere does not fit into any of those three,” he says.

Summer is when officers with the Toronto Anti-Violence Intervention Strategy, or TAVIS, blanket high-crime areas; the Star’s research found those officers card at the highest rates. The force hasn’t announced where TAVIS will be deployed this year.

Morton thinks arguing the practice is a violation of Charter rights is the best way forward. The case could be resolved in a couple of years and the law union is offering to do some of the work pro bono.

“The application would have a high evidentiary burden,” Morton told the group at a meeting earlier this year. “We would need young people to come forward — 30 to 40 of them — to show how prevalent the practice is. But with this we have a shot. A good shot,” he said.

But, he says, a Charter challenge wouldn’t rule out the other two options.

The group is considering small claims court, which is relatively inexpensive, as a way to target individual officers who card at high rates.

A class action suit would be lengthy and expensive and even if successful, would rarely, if ever, result in the police being ordered to change their practice, says Murray Klippenstein, a Toronto lawyer involved in various public interest cases.

But he says, “by declaring a practice to be illegal and awarding a significant amount of money to a group of people as compensation, the incentive or pressure to change the practice becomes pretty substantial.”

The legal move here comes just as a historic class action law suit challenging a New York police practice called “stop and frisk” wrapped up in the U.S.

Statistics show New York police primarily stop black and Latino people, but defend the practice by saying they target violent neighbourhoods where those groups live. They also say the practice has reduced crime and taken guns off the street.

Critics such as the Center for Constitutional Rights, whose lawyers argued the case in court, describe the stops as “unreasonable, suspicionless and racially discriminatory.” Officers list “furtive movement” as the justification more than 50 per cent of the time.

And guns are recovered in 0.15 per cent of cases, which according to the centre, is “lower than the rate of gun seizures at random checkpoints, suggesting both that it is an ineffective way to try to get guns off the street and that seizing weapons is not really the reason people are being stopped.”

Lawyers argued the practice violates the fourth amendment’s protection of unreasonable search and seizure and in doing so, contravenes the fourteenth amendment’s equal protection clause under the law.

Shira Scheindlin, the judge in the case, is expected to issue her ruling later this year.

Here, the Toronto Police Services Board has responded to the Star series, and complaints about carding by passing motions asking for external audits, as well as requesting that officers start handing out receipts, which could happen as early as next month. It’s thought the receipts will make officers more accountable for who they stop and why.

The city’s director of litigation, Albert Cohen, was also asked by the board to weigh in, but he can’t proceed until police finish an internal audit of the practice that he says he needs to inform his legal opinion.

Board chair Alok Mukherjee says the board “must be satisfied that any collection of data and the manner and circumstances in which this is done are not only operationally justified and legitimate but are also respectful of individual rights and free from any discriminatory impact.”

But Duncan worries the board won’t go far enough.

“At the end of the day, what you have to do is limit their options,” he says. “And if we make it very clear that carding is not an option for them, then it will force them to look at another way to do their policing where the community feels that they’re not being victimized.”

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